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“Here it is women who command!” declared Rigopoula Pavlidis, as she sang the virtues of her remote village on the island of Karpathos, one of Greece’s rare matriarchal societies.
Sitting at a desk across the room painting religious icons, her husband Giannis nodded silently.
“My husband can’t do anything without me, not even his tax return,” Pavlidis laughed as she embroidered a traditional dress inside her workshop.
In contrast to most of patriarchal Greece, the women of Olympos play a commanding role in village life.
Isolated from the rest of the Dodecanese island, the spectacular hillside village has safeguarded this centuries-old tradition, which has survived the Ottoman Empire in the 16th century and Italian rule in the 20th.
Until the 1980s, there was no asphalt road to Olympos.
Among the traditions that survive is a Byzantine-era inheritance system that gives a mother’s property to the eldest daughter, said local historian Giorgos Tsampanakis.
Rigopoula, the seamstress, is one of the beneficiaries of the tradition. She inherited 700 olive trees from her mother.
“The families did not have enough property to divide among all the children… and if we had left the inheritance to the men, they would have squandered it,” she said.
Greek women traditionally moved into their new husband’s home upon marriage. In Olympos, the opposite takes place.
